"Why didn't she leave him?" Roger asked. "That's what I don't understand. Honestly, what is the point of sticking around?"

"She had three kids," I offered, as if that answered the question. I was aware as soon as I said it that it answered nothing at all, but I was too exhausted and embarra.s.sed and drunk to offer more.

"Did you inherit those pearls?" asked Scott.

"The pearls?" I felt my hand creep up to my neck, to make sure they were still there, although I could feel them heavy against my neck. Scott raised an eyebrow at me. He was sitting on the floor now, draped in a towel, and he looked a little like Zeus or Apollo or some severe G.o.d who was not going to be easily fooled by mere mortals.

"Yes, the pearls, Tina, don't look so guilty," he commented. "Did you steal them?"

"Did I steal them?"

"Goodness, you sound so paranoid! I was joking, I just wanted to know where you got them, you know they have to be worth a fortune. Is that a melo pearl in the clasp? How much are those worth?" Scott turned to Lyle, who was apparently an expert on all things women wore.

"If you have to ask, you can't afford it," Lyle said, without seeming to notice the questions inside the question. "Although I will note that the clutch you were carrying is a Rue Jacob and probably worth at least fifteen thousand. Does anyone want this last piece of sus.h.i.+?"

"Fifteen-come on, for just the purse?" I asked.

"Well, that's probably what you'd pay for it in a vintage couture shop. You wouldn't get that if you sold it. You'd get maybe five."

"And the pearls?"

"You really want to know?" Lyle asked. You could tell he was wondering what on earth I was doing wearing them if I didn't even know what they were worth.

"I just borrowed them," I said, sliding down a little farther in the bubbles. The steam in the room was making everyone a little pink, so no one could see me blush. I am an accomplished liar, but I didn't feel like lying to these guys. They cared enough about me to respect the truth, which made it hard.

"Isn't that funny," I murmured.

"What's funny, Tina?" asked Andrew gently. I looked at him, surprised that I had spoken the words aloud, like in one of those dreams where you can't tell the difference between what you are thinking and what you are saying.

"It's funny that Lucy and Alison are so easy to lie to, but you're not," I said. "I don't even know you. Shouldn't it be the other way around?"

Before this could lead to any more truth-telling, however, our steam-filled reverie was interrupted.

"Tina Finn, in a hot tub wearing pearls, surrounded by men," said a sardonic voice. "Be still, my heart." Everyone looked up, and there was Vince, his s.h.i.+rt hanging open, lounging in the doorway. While it was true that I had been sitting in that hot tub surrounded by men and bubbles for a good forty minutes, no one had glanced at me that entire time with anything more intrusive than good-natured kindness or drunken bonhomie. Vince's l.u.s.t curled and snapped through the room like a whip. I knew he couldn't see a thing below my breastbone, because the bubbles, frothed up by the water jets, were insanely thick by this point. But for the first time all night I felt naked.

"Go away, Vince," I said. "We're having a good time."

"I can see that. I can't believe I've missed all the fun."

But it wasn't fun anymore. I looked up at him slouching in that doorway, thinking about having s.e.x with me, and he looked like half a dozen other guys I let myself get swallowed up by. I looked over at Roger and Lyle, who were rolling their eyes at each other; there's no mistaking a guy in heat, and if you're not the one he's gunning for, you may as well not be in the room. Our little cabal had turned into some sort of hot fantasy for Vince. As far as the rest of us were concerned, the fun was over.

"Well, we were just taking off," Lyle announced. "It's great to meet you, Tina. Take care of those pearls, those are a treasure. And so are you." He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, dropping his towel carelessly as he did. He truly did spend a lot of time at the gym, so there was no reason not to be bold at a moment like that. Scott and Andrew cheered. "Have a good look, girls," Lyle said, raising his arms with a little flourish as he squeezed by Vince. Roger, who was a little shorter and stouter, held on to his towel, but he kissed me too.

"Bye, Tina, be a good girl," he said. And he gave me a little look, like there was no need to say anything about my past just now but also no need to pretend I didn't have one. Scott and Andrew were collecting their clothes as well. I reached out and kind of grabbed Andrew's wet fingers, and he lifted my hand to his mouth, kissing it sweetly while he raised an eyebrow at me. Vince watched the ma.s.s exodus of gay men with a smirk; there was no question in his mind that he was going to get a turn with me in the hot tub. And then the retreating Roger threw me a lifeline. "Are Dave and Edward still here?" he called from the next room.

This clipped Vince right across the back of the neck. He turned, caught out somehow, and his face got all thoughtful, like he really cared whether or not Dave and Edward were still there. "Yeah, they're in the kitchen, cleaning up, with Jonathan," he called back. Loose towels were lying around everywhere by this point, and I had one in my hand before he had time to turn back.

"You're not getting out?" he asked, petulant, as he slid into the bathroom and closed the door. "Come on, I just got here." There was a spoiled and wicked glint in his eye, and his bare chest seemed to immediately glisten as it came in contact with the humidity. This was a dangerous, soggy moment at the very least, a moment when one's weakness for hot, problematic men might be tested. The one thought that kept me from doing something stupid was the question that good-hearted Roger had flung over his shoulder just before Vince shut the bathroom door.

"What's the story with Dave and Edward?" I asked. "I hear they're both in love with you." Vince c.o.c.ked his head at this, somewhat amused, and gave me enough time to wrap myself in that towel and step out onto the tiles. I wobbled a little, as the floor was slippery and I was drunk-a little less drunk, fortunately, since Vince had arrived and put a straight male damper on things-but cla.s.s triumphed. Vince reached out, a perfect gentleman, and steadied me.

"Who told you that?" he asked.

"Roger and Lyle, they said that half the gathering is in love with you. Is it possible that you have not told those nice boys which side of the fence you fall on?" I asked.

"Not that it's any of your business, Tina, but Dave and Edward and some of the other men here have a fair amount of disposable income that they are considering investing with me. It doesn't have anything to do with fences. Or falling. You look very fetching, wearing nothing but pearls." He was hovering over me, and that thing had happened where I just fit so neatly into the curve of his shoulder it seemed inevitable that we were going to end up having s.e.x on the floor. His arm was curling down my naked back, and his mouth was closing in on mine. Honestly, it was not the kind of situation I would have resisted under normal circ.u.mstances, but my loyalties were not to my past at this moment.

"Vince-I'm not going to have s.e.x with you in your bathroom while you have guests in the next room who are in love with you, because you're letting them think you might be gay so you can get them to give you money," I informed him. His face was right up against mine, so I literally had to whisper it into his ear. "It's not going to happen, Vince. I like those guys. You shouldn't f.u.c.k around with them." I wobbled again and wheeled myself around on my toes, grabbing on to the front of his s.h.i.+rt as I did. For a second he thought he was going to get lucky even though I was telling him he wasn't, but then he realized I had just repositioned myself so I could grab my dress and scoot out the door.

Which is what I did. Lyle and Roger and Scott had moved back to the living room and the kitchen, to rejoin the party, which was still in progress. But Andrew was still there in the bedroom, pulling his ash-colored cashmere crewneck over his head carefully, to keep it from stretching. He looked up and smiled and reached out for my dress, which I handed to him. I finished drying myself off while he went back into the bathroom to find my underwear and stockings and heels, which I had dropped carelessly in corners when I took them off. Andrew helped me slip them on, and then my dress, and neither of us said a thing about Vince watching the whole operation from the door of the bathroom. You can watch all you want, I thought; this is as close as you're going to get to me or Sophie's dress or Sophie's pearls.

21.

AFTER I KISSED ALL THOSE NICE BOYS GOOD-BYE, I WENT BACK TO my beautiful empty apartment and pulled on a T-s.h.i.+rt and crawled into my little bed on the floor and had a dream. It was not a very subtle dream. I was out at the Delaware Water Gap, standing in front of my trailer, alone. The wind was blowing the few trees around so violently that they looked like they might come down. I knew a terrible storm was coming, so I looked around for Alison and Lucy and Mom, but I couldn't see them anywhere. So I ran into the middle of the trailer park to see if I could find them. I could see people in the other trailers, but they were just moving around inside, I didn't know who they were, and every now and then one of them would come to the door to look at me and wave me away. Everyone wanted me to go back to my trailer. One lady started to yell at me and point, and when I looked where she was pointing, I could see a tornado coming, a real tornado with a funnel cloud that seemed to reach all the way to the ground. It was maybe half a mile away and coming right at us. She kept waving her arms, like you have to go home, you have to get to safety, so I ran back to the trailer, even though I knew no one was there, and I knew that a trailer is the last place you want to be during a tornado. I kept thinking, you should just get down on the ground, Tina, get down, that's your only chance. But when I looked at the door of the trailer, I thought someone was in there, maybe Alison or Lucy or Mom had come back and I needed to rescue them. So I went into that terrible old plywood and aluminum trailer, which was empty and dark, but no one was in there, and then the tornado hit and I knew it was too late for me and everybody.

Which of course woke me up. I sat upright, my heart pounding, and for a terrible second I didn't know where I was. That room was usually so dark, but for some reason light was spilling all down the wall. Then I heard someone crying, like a child, long miserable sobs, and I didn't know if it was me or the dream or the ghost or someone breaking into my apartment; honestly, it was disorienting as h.e.l.l. So I held my hand over my heart, trying to force it to slow the f.u.c.k down, and then I turned to see where the light was coming from, thinking I had just forgotten to turn off the hall light, and I saw someone standing in the doorway. A child, in a nightgown, holding a club. And she was real.

"Oh my G.o.d," I said. "Holy s.h.i.+t. Jesus G.o.d above, what do you want? Oh my G.o.d." I don't think I'd ever been so scared in my life. Truly. Over the past two months my mother had died, I'd been invaded, I'd been arrested, I'd met a ghost-and nothing tossed me into complete unblinking terror the way that kid standing there with a club did. I crept up the wall, hoping it would swallow me up and protect me from this unholy vision. It didn't. But rather than enter the room swinging, the kid just stood there and sobbed.

"What do you want?" I said. "Seriously. Seriously. What do you want?"

"You didn't come back!" the kid wailed. "Why didn't you come back?" And then she just stood there and sobbed even harder.

"Katherine?" I said. She stood there and cried, and then she dropped the club on the floor. It was in fact a flashlight, not a club, and another crazy beam of light careened through the room and caught the wall with the sunset painting, then me in the face. But by this time I was out of the bed and across the floor. I scooped Katherine up and held her against my chest.

"It's okay, it's okay," I said, while my heart tried to find something approximating a normal rhythm. "How did you get here?"

"Everybody's mad all the time," she told me. "And Jennifer won't get out of bed."

Working as best I could on the shreds of information the unhappy girl choked out between sobs, I picked up the flashlight and walked out toward the front of the apartment. "You said you would come get us," Katherine accused me. "You said we could see your apartment."

"So now, because you are so brave and impatient, you get to see it," I said cheerfully, flicking on the lights as I pa.s.sed through rooms and hallways. "You are right. I was just too busy and I didn't come back and I promised I would, so now I will show you everything. Did you tell your mom where you were going?" I a.s.sumed the answer would be no, and I was already trying to figure out what on earth I was going to tell Mrs. White when I presented her errant daughter to her in the middle of the night.

"How come there's no furniture?" asked Katherine, looking around. "How come the secret room has all the furniture but there's none out here?" I stopped and looked at her.

"How do you know about the secret room, Katherine?" She looked back at me while I figured it out. "Is that how you got in?" I was standing in the great room now, and I could see, in the moonlight, that all my locks were securely fastened. "You came in through the secret room, through the trapdoor!" I exclaimed, like this was the smartest thing I had ever heard, giving her a little poke. She giggled, finally relaxing. "How did you get the trapdoor open?" I asked.

"We carved a hole in it," she said. "Do you want to see?"

"I do. I think I would like to see that, a lot."

So I turned around and carried Katherine back to the far end of the apartment, where the door to the lost room stood ajar, which was not how I had left it.

"Did you open the door?" I asked her.

"I had a flashlight," she said, as if this explained everything.

"Didn't the ghost scare you? Sometimes she's really loud."

"That's not a ghost, that's a person," Katherine told me. "She lives in Mrs. Westmoreland's apartment."

"How do you know?" I asked.

"Jennifer figured it out when she was trying to make the hole."

The kid was a font of information. She led me into the secret room, past the plundered cardboard boxes, and over to the far wall, where a cupboard had been jammed open, barely. With so many boxes stacked in front of it, I hadn't noticed that cupboard.

"Look," said Katherine. It's just steps." And sure enough, it was exactly as Louise had suspected that night not so long ago. The narrowest of stairways rose and turned within the wall itself.

"Wow," I said. "That is amazing. So you guys worked the plug out?"

"Jennifer did it."

"And how did you get this one open?"

"I just pushed it."

"Did Jennifer help you?"

"Jennifer's in bed. Can you come talk to her?"

"Well, it's kind of late," I reminded her.

"She's really sad," Katherine said again, her eyes wide. "She keeps getting yelled at."

"Why?" I asked. This was not sounding so good.

"Because she won't get out of bed. Never. You have to come now."

"All right, all right," I agreed. "You have to go back to bed anyway."

Now that I realized how the kid had gotten there, the need to get her back without anyone realizing she'd been gone seemed pretty paramount. I most certainly did not want her mother, or her notoriously reactive father, to stick her or his head into Katherine's room and find her gone into a hole in the wall that led directly to my apartment. Obviously I was not the one who had cracked open the crawl s.p.a.ce, but to someone who was inclined to look at it that way, this whole situation might look like I was the one doing the breaking and entering into the Whites' apartment. I looked up the stairwell and then back at Katherine, formulating the shred of a plan.

"Listen," I said. "Don't tell anybody about this, okay? For right now this has to be a secret, and if your mommy finds out about it we're both going to be in big trouble."

"Why?" said Katherine.

"I don't know, kid, that's just the way it is sometimes. We've got to get you back up there and plug the hole up and then think about this."

The ancient red brick stairs built into the wall were curled, claustrophobic, and vertical; I had to grab on to each step above with my hands, and I could hear and feel small living things moving around. Some of them, frankly, were not so small. I remembered from some grade-school history cla.s.s that people in New York in the nineteenth century didn't have enough milk, so many of them died young, and those who survived were really short, which is doubtless how those Victorian workmen managed to fit into this horrifying s.p.a.ce. They also lived in tiny, dark tenements, so climbing up terrifyingly claustrophobic hidden staircases must have seemed normal to them. Or maybe it's just that being poor in any century sucks, and if you have no money you have to do impossible things to survive. Anyway, climbing up that walled-in crawl s.p.a.ce certainly seemed impossible, and by the time I tumbled through the hole in the wall onto the floor of Katherine's closet I was having trouble breathing.

"That's kind of scary," I admitted. When I glanced back at the thin snap of the stairwell as it wound its narrow way up the inside of the building, I saw the shape of an enormous rat slowly disappearing above us. "WHOA," I said, then tried too late to lower my voice. "Wow. Whoa, there's, that's scary."

"You said that twice," Katherine noted.

"That's because it's really actually pretty f.u.c.king scary," I said. "How does this work?" I looked at the wooden slab that Jennifer had somehow crowbarred out of the wall.

Before I could stop her, Katherine pushed it back in to show me. "It just sticks in the wall," she said. "See?"

"And how did you get it out?"

"Well. You put your fingers here," she explained, demonstrating with seven-year-old confidence. "And then you just pull it." She pulled. Nothing happened.

"That's how you do it?" I asked.

"It's stuck," she said.

"It can't be stuck, Katherine. You just did it ten minutes ago. How can it be stuck?" I gave it a try myself, and of course the plug was stuck. On one side, several gouge marks revealed where Jennifer had located its weak spot and managed to pry it out, but because Katherine had pushed it back at an angle, the handhold was now apparently useless. "Oh, boy," I said, trying not to panic.

"You just pull it," Katherine said, yawning. Which I did, about twenty times, twenty different ways. Nothing happened.

"Come on, Katherine, you have to show me how," I repeated hopelessly.

"You push it," she said this time, lying on the floor.

"Don't go to sleep-I'm not kidding, I have to go home, you have to show me how to open it. Katherine, open it. Open it." If she didn't get the thing open, I realized, I was stuck there for good. I could sneak out the front door and take the elevator down to my own apartment, but it was locked from the inside, as I well knew. I needed to get back down the way I had come up.

"Come on, Katherine, you've got to open it for me. Katherine," I hissed, shaking her shoulder. She looked at me, dopey with sleep. "Jennifer knows how to do it." She yawned. "She's the one who figured it out."

I had known where Jennifer's bedroom was when I babysat for the Whites, but in the middle of the night and with only the occasional night-light at floor level as my guide, getting back there wasn't the simplest trick to navigate. I took two wrong turns, one of which landed me in the psychotically pink bedroom of the middle-school monsters, who were sacked out and snoring. The other wrong turn brought me perilously close to barging in on Mr. and Mrs. White themselves, but as I was about to carefully turn the k.n.o.b on their bedroom door, I heard someone moving around, and then Mrs. White asked some sort of question and Mr. White answered. A light went on, and I nearly cursed aloud, but instead I just took a quick step backward and gave thanks to the crazy genius who invented wall-to-wall carpet. The Whites continued to mumble back and forth as I looked around, got my bearings, and turned back one more time, finally locating Jennifer's bedroom at the far end of the next hallway.

Her room was both adorable and disturbing. Like Katherine's, it was painted a glowing yellow and there were stuffed animals everywhere, but in the middle of the room was an enormous bed with a white canopy, and the carpet was a dark and terrifying red.

I crept silently across the blood red sea and knelt down next to the bed. Jennifer, quite frankly, looked like a sleeping princess. "Hey, Jennifer," I whispered. "Wake up. Wake up." She didn't move, so I reached over and touched her shoulder. "Jennifer."

"I'm awake," she announced, completely annoyed. I was so startled that I jumped a little and almost tipped over.

"Well, why didn't you say something?" I asked.

"What are you doing here?" she replied, with the authority of somebody who knows she has the better question. "It's the middle of the night."

"Katherine opened the door to the crawl s.p.a.ce and came down into my apartment," I told her. Jennifer turned her head and smiled but still didn't move. "When did you figure out how to open it?"

"A while ago," she said, seemingly losing interest all of a sudden. "I was going to tell you about it. But then you never came back."

"Well, I'm here now, and I closed it, but I can't get it open again, you have to show me how to do it."

"Why?"

"So I can get home!" I whispered. "Why do I have to explain this? What's going to happen if your parents find me hanging out in your apartment in the middle of the night?"

"They'll be p.i.s.sed off," she mused, barely interested in the question.